2 JANUARY 1959, Page 16

Times Out Of Mind

By RICHARD FOR two weeks now, the men who put the New York newspapers on the street have been on strike, and New Yorkers have had to rely on radio, television, word of mouth and an excellent racing publication, the Morning Telegraph, for news of the world, the nation, the city and, of course, of the offerings on radio and television. There are seven newspapers of general circulation in New York today (a generation ago there were twice that many), and it is a matter of largely local concern that six of them are not publishing. In the case of the seventh, the New York Times, it is more than the city that is being deprived. For although the Times is not a national news- paper, it is a national institution, and many Ameri- cans who never see it and are aware of no par- ticular obligation to it are in fact deeply in its debt.

Without the Times, no one with any professional concern with events as they unfold can function in his accustomed way. Government officials can- not know what is going on in the government when they are unable to consult this newspaper; the Times does a more thorough job in Washing- ton than all the Washington newspapers put together. Without the Times, all other publica- tions that pretend to any seriousness are gravely handicapped, for the Times sets the standard, and a great deal of American journalism is really the Times in paraphrase, a day or two late. The syndicated columnists, the news magazines, the journals of opinion, radio and television analysis —all of these are dependent upon the Times. There are few writers on public affairs who do not work on the comfortable assumption that the Times will call to their attention anything they would want called to their attention. One reason I find myself writing about the Times now is that, not having read it for two weeks, I do not consider myself abreast of political events.

It is, I think, a fairly safe bet that without the Times not quite so much is happening. For the power of the Times is such that news is often made so that it may be published in the Times. When people in public life wish to see a statement or a decision handled objectively and responsibly, they say what they have to say through the Times, and when they cannot do this they are likely to wait until they can.

I do not think that there is in the world another newspaper that comes even close to doing what the Times does. In Europe there are journals of greater distinction in one department or another, but the services rendered in this country by the Times are elsewhere rendered not by any single agency but by several. Broadly speaking, the Times attempts to fulfil two obligations. One is to history; it is a newspaper of record, a great and superbly organised and indexed archive. The other is to a reader who does not exist. The Times attempts to give each morning all the informa- tion that a civilised New Yorker could possibly wish on the developments of the preceding twenty-four hours in every department of life in which a civilised New Yorker could, as the Times managers and editors see it, have a legitimate interest. It offers, of course, vastly more than any one man could hope to digest. A half-way thorough reading of the Times takes half a working day, and a week would hardly suffice for the study of all that the Sunday Times regards as coming within the scope of the paper's rather stuffy and self-righteous slogan—'All the News That's Fit to Print.' The compleat Times reader is a man who is not satisfied with a mere digest of what John Foster Dulles said at his news conference, but wishes to examine the transcript for himself. When elections are in the offing, he wishes to know how things are going in such remote provinces as North Dakota and Utah, and the Times is at his service with a team of reporters. If a convention of gastro-enterolo- gists is taking place, he wishes a day-by-day account of their deliberations. He would count the day lost in which he did not have a couple of bulletins from Moscow, and he cannot go more than a few days without news from Amman, Sofia, Quito and Belgrade. His intellectual life would be impoverished if he were not offered an expert appraisal of the latest developments in all the line and lively arts, in all the financial markets, in all sports, and in all aspects of mili- tary strategy.

It is possible and it is in some circles very fashionable to deplore many things about the Times—its heavy-handedness, the middlebrow quality of much of its criticism, the vapidness of much of its editorial comment, the pompousness of some of its Sunday supplements, the flatness of much of its writing, even the fatness of the paper itself. Most of these things exist to b'e deplored, but they detract little from the massive distinction of this newspaper, which has a noble and ennobling view of its readers and a mag- nificent sense of responsibility toward the truth of each passing day.